Adobe: US consumers spent $8.9B online on Black Friday, down from the record $9B in 2020, the first ever YoY decline
- Traffic at retail stores on Black Friday dropped 28.3% compared with 2019 levels, according to preliminary data from Sensormatic Solutions.
Context & Ripple Effects
The record $9B Black Friday of 2020 — up 21.6% and 40% via smartphones — was a pandemic artifact, with shoppers locked out of stores. A year later Adobe's index prints its first-ever year-over-year decline at $8.9B, while Sensormatic's preliminary data shows store traffic still 28.3% below 2019 levels.
That combination — online down AND physical traffic depressed — is what makes this print notable rather than a simple channel rotation story. The pattern held into Cyber Monday, where spending came in below expectations and down 1.4% from 2020, before growth resumed by Cyber Monday 2025's $14.25B, up 7.1%.
First-order effects
- Retailers that staffed inventory and logistics for another pandemic-style e-commerce surge face softer-than-planned online demand on the season's biggest day, with Adobe's measurement itself becoming the number their holiday forecasts get marked against.
- Brick-and-mortar operators see demand recover only partially: even with shoppers back in stores, Sensormatic's traffic remains more than a quarter below 2019 levels, so neither channel fully replaces the other this season.
Second-order effects
- With both channels underwhelming, retailers lean harder on promotions through Cyber Monday and the rest of the five-day stretch, compressing margins and shifting pricing power toward discount-led players.
- Adobe's e-commerce index cements its role as the de facto market barometer — its prints move coverage and expectations for the whole retail sector, including the follow-on Cyber Monday readings days later.
Third-order effects
- The 2020 spike is revealed as pulled-forward demand rather than a new baseline: holiday e-commerce normalizes toward single-digit growth, a trajectory the corpus confirms with 2018's 23% surge, 2021's decline, and 2025's 7.1% gain bracketing the arc.
- Channel mix becomes a planning variable rather than a one-way bet — retailers that over-indexed on pandemic-era digital assumptions rebalance toward omnichannel footprints, since neither pure-online nor pure-store models captured full demand in 2021.
The trend: US holiday e-commerce is normalizing off its pandemic peak, with Adobe's annual Black Friday and Cyber Monday reads marking the transition from lockdown-era surges to steady single-digit growth.